ABDUL-JABBAR, Kareem

(b. 16 April 1947 in New York City), Hall of Fame basketball player who was one of the most dominant centers in the sport's history.

Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis "Lew" Alcindor, Jr., in Harlem, the only child of Lewis Alcindor, Sr., a transit police officer, and Cora Alcindor, a homemaker. Height ran in the family. Abdul-Jabbar's mother was nearly six feet tall, and his father was six feet, two inches. Abdul-Jabbar's parents told him that his grandfather, who had come from Alcindor Trace, a section of the Balandra district of Trinidad, was over six feet, eight inches in height, and Abdul-Jabbar was over twenty-two inches long at birth.

Abdul-Jabbar's mother read to him constantly, hence he learned to love books at an early age. His father, who played the trombone, often took Abdul-Jabbar to the Elks Club at 5th Avenue and 126th Street, where the senior Alcindor joined other musicians for long jam sessions. From his father, who graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in 1952, Abdul-Jabbar gained a lasting love of jazz music.

When Abdul-Jabbar was three, his father thought the area around Seventh Avenue and 111th Street was becoming too dirty and dangerous, so in 1950 he moved his family to the Dyckman Housing Project in Inwood, a section of northern Manhattan. Between the first and second grades at P.S. 52, Abdul-Jabbar first picked up a basketball and tried unsuccessfully to put it through the hoop. When he was eight years old his parents, devout Catholics, transferred him to Saint Jude's, a private Catholic boy's school nearby, where he was one of only two blacks.

When Abdul-Jabbar was ready to enter fourth grade, his parents were both working, so they enrolled him in Holy Providence, a Catholic school in Pennsylvania. The five-foot, four-inch boy was teased for his height, shyness, and bookish habits. He participated in swimming, track, baseball, and basketball and soon learned to love the last sport. Most of the other students at Holy Providence spoke and behaved in a rough manner. After one year his parents withdrew Abdul-Jabbar, returning him to Saint Jude's in the fall of 1957. He joined the basketball team and, although he was six feet tall, spent most of the season on the bench. Farrell Hopkins, his coach, helped him improve his skills, allowing the eager youngster to continue practice after regular hours.

When Abdul-Jabbar was in seventh grade, Hopkins got the team new uniforms. Abdul-Jabbar's new number was 33, the number he wore for the remainder of his basketball career. Encountering racial prejudice from whites, he concentrated on his studies and basketball. By the eighth grade, when he was fourteen, he was six feet, eight inches tall and could dunk. In one game he scored thirty-three points, more than the entire team usually scored.

Abdul-Jabbar's friend and neighbor Arthur Kenny, a freshman at Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school for boys in Manhattan, took Abdul-Jabbar to practice at the high school, where the coach, Jack Donohue, offered Abdul-Jabbar a full scholarship. Donohue ran a summer camp at Friendship Farm in Saugerties, New York, and he invited Abdul-Jabbar to spend the summer before his freshman year there. The only black player at the camp, Abdul-Jabbar was shunned by the other boys, and he returned home after only three weeks.

Abdul-Jabbar played on the varsity team at Power Memorial Academy in his freshman year, and by his sophomore year he had become a great player, leading the school to the New York City Catholic high school championship. He was named to numerous All-America high school teams and had his picture in national magazines. By his junior year the sixteen year old was seven feet, one-and-a-half inches tall and almost unstoppable on the basketball court. During halftime of a game against Saint Helena's in the Bronx, Coach Donohue scolded his team for a lackadaisical performance and hurled a racial epithet at his star center. Abdul-Jabbar was stunned. He eventually led Power Memorial to another city championship, but he refused to work during the summer at Friendship Farm. During his senior year Abdul-Jabbar broke the New York City high school basketball records for career points (2,076) and total rebounds (2,002). He graduated in 1965 and won a New York State Regents' scholarship. Heavily recruited, Abdul-Jabbar enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Abdul-Jabbar liked the UCLA coach John Wooden immediately. He spent most of his time with black friends, like Lucius Allen, his roommate and teammate on the freshman basketball team, and J. J. Johnson, who introduced him to black literature. Reading Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Abdul-Jabbar became interested in black nationalism and the religion of Islam.

Shunned by many whites, Abdul-Jabbar devoted himself to basketball. In his first season he broke the previous UCLA freshman records for total points (696), total rebounds (425), and single game total points (48). Off the court he was not so successful. Because he refused to give interviews, reporters described him as moody and surly. The white girl he was dating received threatening calls, forcing the couple to break off the relationship.

As a sophomore Abdul-Jabbar set a school single game scoring record (56 points) in his first varsity game. UCLA won all twenty-six games that season, and its star center was chosen Player of the Year by a United Press International poll. In the summer of 1967 Abdul-Jabbar found rewarding work teaching basketball in the ghetto areas of New York City in a program called Operation Sports Rescue, run by the New York City Housing Authority.

In his junior year Abdul-Jabbar led UCLA to another championship season. Because he could stuff the ball so easily, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) banned the dunk shot. To compensate, Coach Wooden helped Abdul-Jabbar develop a hook shot, which over the years developed into the famous skyhook, a modification of the traditional hook shot in which the ball travels downward from the peak of an arch. Joining other black athletes, he boycotted the 1968 Olympics because of the discrimination that black athletes who had won medals in the 1964 Olympics faced at home. As a result he received a great deal of hate mail. He took refuge again in Operation Sports Rescue over the summer. At the same time he converted to Islam. His new name became Kareem (noble and generous) Abdul (servant) Jabbar (powerful).

Abdul-Jabbar's senior year capped a significant college career. He became the first player to receive the NCAA Tournament Most Valuable Player (MVP) award three times. When he left UCLA he had won a record eighty-eight games, losing only to Houston and the University of Southern California. He had scored a total of 2,325 points (26.4 per game average) and had grabbed 1,367 rebounds (15.5 per game average). Writing his senior thesis on Islam in North America, he graduated in 1969 with a B.A. degree in history.

In 1969, signing a five-year, $1.4 million contract, Abdul-Jabbar began his pro basketball career with the last-place Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association (NBA). By the end of his first season he had earned NBA Rookie of the Year honors for the 1969–1970 season and had carried the Bucks to the Eastern Division playoffs. In his second season Abdul-Jabbar teamed up with the legendary Oscar Robertson, recently traded to Milwaukee from the Cincinnati Royals, and the Bucks won the 1971 NBA championship. Abdul-Jabbar was named MVP of the NBA finals.

On 28 May 1971 Abdul-Jabbar married Janice Brown, a schoolteacher, in Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter he changed his name legally to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. His wife also changed her name, taking the Islamic name of Habiba. They had one daughter. In 1972 Abdul-Jabbar won the league's MVP award. In December 1974, after suffering an eye injury while going for a loose ball, he began to wear goggles when he played. That season Abdul-Jabbar was again named the league MVP.

By the end of the 1974–1975 season, Abdul-Jabbar's marriage had soured. Habiba, beleaguered from the pressures of being a pro basketball wife, took their three-year-old daughter and moved back to Washington, D.C. Abdul-Jabbar had never liked Milwaukee and asked to be traded. In 1975 he signed a five-year contract with the Los Angeles Lakers and moved into a ranch house in Stone Canyon, above the UCLA campus. Although the Lakers' new team did not make the playoffs that year, Abdul-Jabbar won his fourth MVP award in six years as a pro basketball player. In 1976 the American Basketball Association merged into the National Basketball Association, bringing to the Lakers many new players and a new coach, Jerry West, who guided Abdul-Jabbar to his fifth MVP award.

The Lakers had their star center, and all they needed was a playmaker. They found that person in the 1979–1980 season, when they added a rookie, Earvin "Magic" Johnson. The Jabbar-Johnson combination helped the Lakers win the NBA championship that season, and Abdul-Jabbar won an unprecedented sixth MVP title. Taking over as head coach in 1981, Pat Riley developed a running game based on the fast break known as "show time," which won the Lakers their second NBA title in three years in 1982. On 5 April 1984 Abdul-Jabbar surpassed Wilt Chamberlain to become the league's all-time leading scorer with 31,420 total career points. According to Abdul-Jabbar, the best moment in his career was in 1985, when the Lakers beat the Boston Celtics for the NBA title.

By 1986 the offensive leadership of the Lakers had passed to Magic Johnson, and while the team continued to win NBA titles, Abdul-Jabbar struggled for points. In 1989 his streak of 787 consecutive games in which he scored in double figures came to an end. By this time he was averaging only eight points and four rebounds per game. He was still suffering financially from a 1983 fire that had destroyed his Bel-Air home and ruined his beloved, valuable jazz record collection. In addition he had lost millions of dollars in bad business investments. In 1989, at age forty-two, Abdul-Jabbar decided to retire. He had won six world championships and six MVP awards. In 1995 he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Frustrated by retirement and devastated by the death of his mother, Abdul-Jabbar sought work. In 1999 he coached the high school basketball team at White Mountain Apache Reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona. He was an assistant coach for the Los Angeles Clippers from February to May 2000. He made many movie and television appearances, including memorable Hollywood roles as the copilot named Flying High in Airplane! (1980) and the Monster Shouter in Stephen King's The Stand (1994). He had two sons in relationships after Habiba left (they divorced in 1993), and he has spent most of his retirement time with his three children, traveling between his homes in Los Angeles and Maui, Hawaii. Most of his earnings have come from speaking engagements, signing autographs at trading card shows, and product endorsements.

Abdul-Jabbar's pro basketball career statistics are staggering. His regular-season numbers averaged 24.6 points, 11.2 rebounds, and 3.6 blocked shots per game. He had a lifetime shooting percentage of .559, and he was first-team all-league ten times and second-team five times. He established NBA records for most seasons of 1,000 or more points (19), most minutes played (57,446), most field goals (15,837), most field goal attempts (28,307), most points (38,387), and most personal fouls (4,657) as well as several NBA All-Star Game records.

Abdul-Jabbar authored three autobiographical memoirs, Giant Steps (1983), Kareem (1991), and A Season on the Reservation (2000), along with a chronicle of the lives of famous African Americans, Profiles in Black Courage (1996). James Haskins, From Lew Alcindor to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1972), gives detailed information about Abdul-Jabbar's early life. Thomas R. Cobourn, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1995), is the most recent biography and contains an extensive bibliography.

John J. Byrne